Experts say that if you want to age healthily, you should plan for it. That's what I've tried to do: I played in a soccer league well into my 60s, and I was a regular runner. Those activities kept me fit and active at the time. Now, in my 70s, I hope they continue to pay dividends. Healthy aging is something the Milken Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, has long focused on. Ten years ago, it published a series of essays...
By Rui Li, Duanyang Gao & Yuying Yang Background Unhealthy behavior is an important factor threatening the health of older rural residents in China. We examine the effects of receiving pension on elderly rural residents’ health behavior (namely conscious control of sugar, salt, and edible oil intake, as well as learning health or wellness knowledge), also including effect heterogeneity by income level and gender. Methods Using China Rural Revitalization Survey (CRRS) in 2020, we used the policy rule of the...
For decades, policymakers and economists have assumed a fairly intuitive chain of causation: a more generous pension means more money in old age, more money means better food, better care, less stress, and therefore better health. A new study drawing on nationwide Chinese survey data puts that assumption under an unusually rigorous statistical microscope, and the results are strikingly deflationary. Using the 2022 wave of the China Family Panel Studies, or CFPS, researchers Qing Li and Xiaojing Huang of...
People who naturally stay awake late at night may face a higher risk of receiving a disability pension before reaching retirement age, a new study suggests. Researchers found that evening-type people had about a 70% higher risk than morning types. However, the finding does not mean that being a night owl directly causes disability. What did the study on night people find? Researchers in Finland followed 5,679 adults for 12 years, using information collected in 2012 and national pension records through...
Population aging and shortages of long-term care workers have increased interest in care-giving robots and information and communication technology (ICT). This paper provides novel large-scale evidence on older individuals’ perceptions of such technologies, drawing on a custom-designed internet survey of 4,314 Japanese individuals aged 55 to 75. Respondents choose between two otherwise identical nursing homes: one in which all care is provided by human caregivers, and one in which robots and ICT are used to provide a substantial share...
On August 10, International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples was observed–a day to honour the cultures and traditions of Indigenous populations. There are an estimated 476 million Indigenous people globally, living across 90 countries and representing more than 5000 different cultures. Despite the vast diversity in social, cultural, economic, and political characteristics, Indigenous peoples face similar adversities, rooted in common histories of colonialism and oppression that removed ancestral lands and aimed to destroy cultural identities. Indigenous populations worldwide...
By Jules SADEFO KAMDEM Population ageing and climate change jointly threaten the functional capacity that sustains autonomy, labour supply, productivity, and fiscal resilience. This paper develops a continuous- time, age-structured model in which healthy longevity is a regenerative form of human capital. Cohort health is exposed to biological depreciation, a standardised heat-stress state, diffusion risk, and marked compound-Poisson losses. Prevention, climate adaptation, education, and effectively accessible artificial intelligence can offset avoidable depreciation. AI is accumulated as a depreciating capital stock...
What if there was a single metric that could capture every aspect of your health — how strong you are, how clear your vision is, how sharply you think? That’s the goal of intrinsic capacity, a holistic measure of what someone’s body and mind are capable of. “It’s not really a sexy term,” but it makes sense from a scientific perspective, said Dr. John Beard, a professor of productive aging at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health who helped...
By Xiaoyun Zhang & Yiyang Luo This paper investigates the long-term consequences of involuntary job displacement on multidimensional health outcomes among middle-aged and older adults in urban China, using the 2014 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey (CHARLS) Life History Questionnaire. To address the endogeneity of job loss, we exploit business closures, position cancellations, and layoffs during the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) reforms in the late 1990s as exogenous labor market shocks and employ Propensity Score Matching (PSM) to control for...
Living longer used to feel like the whole point. More birthdays, more time with people you love, more years to do the things that matter. But a new analysis tracking 204 countries over three decades is asking a harder question: are those extra years actually good ones? Researchers found that while life expectancy has risen significantly around the world, more of those added years are being spent managing chronic illness, pain, or disability. It's a shift that changes how we think about healthspan versus...
